St. Luke's Attic

Cherry pick the printmaking detritus for the good stuff.

This isn’t one of those posts abut sprucing up leftovers to please the whole finicky family, nor is it one of those screeds about being frugal, using everything you have to the fullest, composting, or even recycling. It’s about collage. “Collage, you say? Why I went to collage, it was the best, most expensive 7 1/2 years of my life.” Not “college” you doofus (are you even paying attention?), collage. You know, the assemblage of seeming disparate elements into a new coherent whole. Mostly it’s a technique employed by artists when they don’t want to put in the effort to draw or paint anything new. Why not just use scraps of old stuff and call it collage?

Collage: The artistic equivalent of stir fry. Nothing goes to waste and  you get the satisfaction of cleaning out the refrigerator.

As a printmaker, I love collage. I have lots and lots of images or pieces of images that sort of worked out, but not really. Why not just cut out the good parts and stick them all together? It often happens that when you put the old images in new situations, new ideas suggest themselves. I will see relationships between images that I never saw before. Sometimes small collages lead to large-scale pieces, or entire new series.

Collage is more than just a greatest hits clip show. It’s something new.